Series:

This book provides a deeper understanding of the phone-based composing practices of youth and their implications for literacy learning. In the United States, smartphone use among teens is nearly universal, yet many youth who are avid digital composers still struggle with formal schooled literacy. The widespread and rapid embrace of smartphones by youth from all income levels has had a substantial impact on the way that young people approach the act of composing, yet to date, little to no work has explored digital photography and text curation through popular apps like Twitter and Instagram and their impact on literacy, including formal schooled literacy. As more schools are moving to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) models and lifting classroom bans on cellphones, classroom teachers need information about the affordances of phones for formal literacy learning, which this book provides.

This book will also be of interest to those in courses in the fields of education, new literacies, cultural studies/youth culture, literacy studies, communication arts, and anthropology of education/social sciences. This book could be used in a course on online/Internet ethnography. It could also be used in a more general research methods course to illustrate the combination of online and offline data collection. Outside of research methods courses, it could be used in courses on literacies, digital literacies, youth culture, popular culture and media, or mobile learning.

Chapter 2. Conceptual Landscape

Chapter

Extract

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Conceptual Landscape

Abstract

This chapter provides the framework for the major issues explored in the chapters that follow, beginning with addressing the longstanding and ongoing debate around the ways in which technology influences society through some of the arguments that specifically deal with youth culture (e.g., deterioration of language, Google-induced stupidity). It lays out the concepts of digital tools, architecture, and affordances with regard to digital literacy practices, and outlines the affordances of the mobile phone (e.g., mobility, camera) and the architecture of the apps that will be explored in the later chapters such as Twitter and Instagram. This chapter presents a broad review of relevant literature. It closes with an exploration of the current education policy landscape as it relates to to technology and in particular the intersection of policy, technology and rural schools.